Escape the News with the British Podcast “In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg”

We’re all comfortable with discussing these academic subjects, Melvyn Bragg’s tone seems to say; no need to be self-important.

Photograph by Awakening / Getty

“In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg,” a weekly BBC Radio 4
program that has aired in the U.K. since 1998, consists of a
conversation between its host and three academics about some worthy
cultural or historical subject—recently, Picasso’s “Guernica,”feathered dinosaurs, Germaine de Stael, and the Picts. (Up next: Thebes.) The show is beloved
in the U.K.; for American podcast enthusiasts, it might be experienced
as a refreshing change of pace. It’s nothing like the “This American
Life” style of audio entertainment, marked by self-effacing narrative
authority, inventive sound design, human intimacy of various kinds, and
artfully revealed narrative surprises. It is not organized into themed
seasons or arcs. Nor is it an NPR-style show about current events,
scientific discoveries, or new books, satisfying a need to keep up with
the cultural conversation. It’s just four intelligent people in a
studio, discussing complex topics that are, as a friend of mine once
said of Bragg’s openers, aggressively uncommercial. To mark the show’s
seven-hundred-and-fiftieth episode, last year, a Top Ten list of favorite shows
was chosen by listeners. The winning episodes included “1816, the Year Without a Summer,” “The Gin Craze,” “Photosynthesis,” and “Hildegard of Bingen.” Take that, journalistic pegs and hooks.

Bragg, who is seventy-eight, grew up in a town called Wigton, in Cumbria, as
the only child of working-class parents. For much of his youth, the
family lived above a pub. He went on to study modern history at Oxford,
publish three dozen books—fiction and nonfiction—and host
long-running culture programs on both TV (“The South Bank Show”) and
radio. In 1998, Tony Blair appointed him as a life Labour peer in the
House of Lords: he is Lord Bragg of Wigton. British journalists have
written about Bragg’s relationships, his holiday parties, his attendance
at royal weddings, his lush head of hair. For the naïve American
listener, aware of little or none of this context, it’s pleasant just
listening to this bluff, no-nonsense presence powering his way through
conversation about the Baltic Crusades or the Epic of Gilgamesh. When
“The South Bank Show” went off the air, in 2012, British observers
worried that it marked a foreboding shift in the cultural landscape—a
wide-scale dumbing down. But “In Our Time,” an ideas show in which you
run up quickly against your intellectual strengths and weaknesses, just
as you did in school, garners two million listeners a week.

“In Our Time” has a straightforward structure. Bragg gives a very brief
introduction (“Hello. Until twenty years ago, dinosaurs were widely
assumed to be large, lumpen lizards that became extinct millions of
years ago”); he asks a guest for background (“Mike Benton, how did the
idea become commonplace that dinosaurs were slow, heavy lizards?”); he
pushes onward (“How was Huxley’s news received?”); he brings in the
second expert (“Steve Brusatte, before we go further, can you give us a
few astonishing facts about their lifetime, and what they did, and why
they were there so long, and how most of them were extinguished so
quickly?”); and the third (“Maria McNamara, what are our listeners to
understand by ‘feathers’?”). Once the conversation gets off the ground,
Bragg brings in other questions and ideas, continues to extract insights
from the academics, draws toward a conclusion, and swiftly wraps up. In
the podcast, there’s an extra bit afterward, in which host and guests
talk about things they didn’t have time to cover on the air. These
segments feel pleasantly like eavesdropping, or hanging out backstage
after a lecture. There’s a “How’d we do?” quality, almost as if the tape
has been left running. (“And Maria, you didn’t get on to the molecules,
and the survival of organic matter, but there we are.”) Somebody comes
in and asks if they’d like coffee or tea, and it ends, with the brief
teaser of the announcement of next week’s odd topic.

For me, a secondary pleasure of “In Our Time”—and I say this
respectfully—is that I find it quite funny, and always because of Bragg.
For one, there are those abrupt openers: “Hello, if you were to point a
reasonably powerful telescope at the surface of the moon at latitude
17.9 degrees, longitude 92.5 degrees, you’ll find yourself looking at
the al-Biruni crater.” “Hello, ‘Four Quartets’ is T. S. Eliot’s last
great poem.” “Hello, the Gin Craze gripped Britain in the eighteenth
century, when the government feared that poor people were drinking far
too much cheap gin, damaging their own health and the safety and
well-being of all.” “Hello, Germaine de Staël was born in Paris, in
1766, where her father was finance minister to Louis XVI and her mother
held dazzling salons.” Barrelling ahead, his manner is similarly
efficient—broadly curious, bluntly purpose-driven. “Let’s zoom in on
Pushkin,” he says in the “Eugene Onegin” episode, rolling up
his sleeves. He’s stern with his good-natured, compliant academics: he
doesn’t want to hear about all six of Jane Austen’s brothers, thank you.
In one episode, he says, briskly, “Can I ask you, Jane Gelman, about
time in ‘Mrs Dalloway.’ It was originally called ‘The Hours,’ Big Ben
keeps striking, clocks are all over the place—right.”

We’re all comfortable with discussing these subjects, his tone seems to
say; no need to be self-important. (And there’s none of the
self-congratulatory “We’re nerds!” giddiness that can accompany talk
about the highbrow or the arcane among people of my generation,
especially in the U.S., especially on podcasts.) Bragg can be slangy, in
his way—part Henry Higgins, part Eliza Doolittle. Napoleon “only comes a
cropper when he tries to invade Russia”; while E. M. Forster was nervous about “Maurice,” he observes, Virginia Woolf was “bowling away with lesbianism.” An overly optimistic “Little Women” joke, quickly regretted, in the Emily Dickinson episode, generated a confused few seconds of his attempting to find some link between
Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott; when I heard this moment, this summer
on Cape Cod, as I ambled through the woods, I actually stopped in my
tracks, I was so startled and amused. His guests were flummoxed, too, as
was Bragg, it seemed, but then he shook it off and rolled right along.

During that Cape Cod vacation, I developed a new appreciation for “In
Our Time.” Hiking through marshes, or watering flowerbeds and lugging
garden hoses around, I sought to escape the feeling of cultural busyness
of daily life in Manhattan and the anxiety of political life in America
in 2017—but I also wanted perspective. Heading into the winter holidays,
it’s something to keep in mind. “In Our Time” provides perspective the
way that reading a classic novel does. This summer, I listened to every
literature episode of the past few years (the whole archive is available online), explored British views of the Gettysburg Address
and the Salem witch trials, and bravely poked around in the realms of
the unknown—Saturn, eunuchs, Gerald of Wales. In part because “In Our
Time” is unconnected to things that are coming out, things happening
right this minute, things being promoted, it feels aligned with the
eternal rather than the temporal, and is therefore escapist without
being junk. On Cape Cod, listening to the “Emma” episode, I excitedly
typed the phrase “the danger of intellectual solitude” into my notepad—a
danger articulated by Austen, which Emma faced before her novel’s worth
of adventures and lessons, and which “In Our Time,” week after week,
unsentimentally fends off.